Helioclock Now Talks to Your RTL-SDR — And We’re Headed to Huntsville Two pieces of news worth sharing this week: Helioclock now has full live RTL-SDR integration built in, and we’ll be showing it off in person at the Huntsville Hamfest / ARRL National Convention, August 22–23. See the Press Release HERE. Your RTL-SDR Dongle, … Read more
Posted by KA9NWM Monday July 27th the press release goes out, so it’s official: Helioclock will make its public debut at the ARRL National Convention, Huntsville Hamfest, August 22-23, 2026, at booth #V55. If you’ve been following along here, none of this is a surprise, but I wanted to put the real announcement in front … Read more
Posted by KA9NWM Once the website was in good shape, the rest of July turned into the busiest, most concentrated stretch of the whole project so far. I want to walk through the real shape of it, because a lot of it was research and rebuilding as much as it was new features. It started … Read more
Posted by KA9NWM For most of the first week of July, I stepped away from the app itself and spent nearly the whole stretch on helioclock.com. It’s easy to underestimate how much time a real product website takes until you’re actually building one page by page. I built it on WordPress, hosted on Pressable, with … Read more
Posted by KA9NWM I stepped away from active development for a couple weeks in the middle of June. Life happens, I got very sick with a new flu variant and wow did it knock me down. It’s a solo project, so when I came back at the end of the month there was a real … Read more
Posted by KA9NWM I keep getting asked some version of the same question: why does Helioclock feel different from a typical hobbyist dashboard project? The honest answer isn’t about ham radio at all. It’s about where I spent the first four decades of my working life. I started as a broadcast meteorologist at a TV … Read more
Posted by KA9NWM The first couple days of June were spent finishing pieces that had been sitting half-done since May, and getting the first real marketing material ready for Huntsville Hamfest. The Markets panel had been on the list for a while, and it turned into a good lesson in trusting your own data before … Read more
Posted by KA9NWM May was the month I stopped thinking about Helioclock as a side project and started building it like a product with a ship date. That framing actually started a little before May 1st. Hamvention in Dayton runs every year in mid-May, for 2026 it landed May 15-17, and around the third week … Read more
Posted by KA9NWM I said in the last post that Helioclock started April 20, 2026. What I didn’t say is that it didn’t start with that name. Day one was a Fire TV project. I’d been eyeing Geochron’s mechanical world clocks for years, beautiful things, but $300–500 plus a $128/year subscription for a display that, … Read more
Why I Started Building Helioclock Posted by KA9NWM Helioclock started on April 20, 2026. I want to write down why, while I still remember it clearly. For years, hams running a station clock and propagation display had one real option: HamClock, built by WB0OEW. It did the job it was built to do — greyline, … Read more